Recent reviews by Nah, I'd win

I guess most people are wondering how difficult the game is, since there have been many articles claiming that the game is tougher than the previous From software games such as the Souls series or Bloodborne, well my take on this is, after spending considerable time playing this game, that in might just be (in a certain way), let me elaborate, lets use Souls games as an example, so in all installments of the Souls game the alpha-omega is trying to learn attack patterns of the enemies and dodging accordingly, no matter how hard the boss might seem, if you memorize its attack styles, animations and how they telegraph it and on top of that wont be greedy, any boss becomes quite trivial, moreover there are lots of guides that help you with that, furthermore whats also important to note is that in certain scenarios you can also sort of parry enemy attacks(instead of just dodging) and inflict heavy damage afterwards however this mechanic is much harder to pull of than simple dodging and was only implementable on some, not all enemies, however the situation in Sekiro is completely reversed, since the vast majority of enemies you encounter use attacks, that can and should be parried(except few minor exceptions), however there are certain differences between a parry in Souls games and the Sekiro one, first off Sekiro calls the mechanic "deflecting", and is used to fill the "posture bar" on the enemy(I'll explain that later), the important thing for now is that you simply have to learn how to time deflecting attacks, which is definitely more difficult to master since deflecting requires better timing than dodging(to further explain, you can for example spam the deflect mechanic, which enables the deflect element, however just by spamming it you don't achieve a so called "perfect deflect" and will instead fill your own posture bar and will get staggered. There are also many new elements in the game, namely so called "posture"(as I mentioned before), which is directly tied to again a new mechanic called "deathblows", in a nutshell every enemy has a posture bar which is being filled by either inflicting damage or deflecting attacks, once the posture bar gets filled you can perform a so called "deathblow" killing the enemy(deathblows are the only way to kill a boss or a mini boss, preferable to just depleting their health bar, as mastering deflecting and filling boss's posture bar is the quickest way to defeat a boss, that being said you can still kill normal entities by depleting their health bars), so there is inevitably going to be a learning curve, if you are coming from the Souls series, you will have to adapt and almost completely forget about dodging in the vast majority of fights, this however only takes a while to master and I got the hang of it quite fast.(As I had played the Souls games prior to Sekiro).There are also many other new elements such as various prosthetic gadgets which can help you in many ways and let you be more creative in your gameplay(In Sekiro you are generally much more mobile than in Souls series, you jump a lot, grapple onto various buildings, trees etc, which is really fun and feels very natural), there are also various skill trees which are also quite refreshing(they replace stats, you cant really upgrade your stats as you could within the Souls games for example(lot of the rpg elements which the Souls series is known for are omitted here, which is not necessarily a bad thing as sekiro is more story oriented, you can still upgrade your vitality and attack damage through killing bosses and certain items, however that's pretty much the only stat that you can scale), the game locations are extremely beautiful and very-well made, the enemy npcs are also quite unique(although sometimes might seem a bit repetitive as same enemies might appear in certain different locations, however since it is tied to the lore, its understandable and acceptable), the lore is extremely interesting as well, however as in all From software games hard to understand from the game itself, I suggest you watch various youtube videos that explain it in-depth, also there are 4 unique endings and acquiring some of them is in my opinion almost impossible without the use of various guides throughout the internet so you also might want to check them out during your gameplay). All in all I would say that Sekiro is extremely refreshing addition to the From software games series offering many same well-working and loved mechanics imported from the the Souls games combined with many completely new ones or heavily altered ones, so in conclusion if you liked previous Souls games you will definitely enjoy Sekiro, and even if you are new to the From software series you should definitely give it a try, even tough its quite challenging at first(having a really demanding learning curve) ,because of this I can see some people outright giving up on the game after getting frustrated with it, in regards to this and I cant stress this enough is that if you start feeling hopeless at any point in the game you can and you should always consider using various guides and the wiki, which help extremely, and you shouldnt hesitate or feel embarrassed to use them, and after some dedication and many possible rage quits I am pretty sure that literally anyone will be able to beat the game and the feeling of reward after beating a boss that you have been stuck on for a while is quite something.

*Note This review is mainly targeted to people who played previous installments of the mount and blade game series. The long awaited sequel to the critically acclaimed Mount and Blade series, with expectations being as high as they were, the developers had their work cut out for them, this review is being written after spending 200 hours in the game and being inactive from it for more than a year now(we'll get to the reason later on), firstly let me talk about the game in general and how it progressed since it was released. Being the huge mount and blade fan that I am(having some 770 hrs on mount and blade warband) I had huge expectations for this title and bought it the day it released( its important to state that I was fully aware of the fact that the game was released in its alpha state, so unlike others expecting getting a full-fledged game setting themselves up for and huge disappointment, I knew that I wouldnt get a fully finished product), however I might say that I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the game was already in a really good shape, yes the optimization wasnt good, there were many bugs, glitches, many mechanics missing or not working properly, there was a huge pile of things to do,(and there still are even today as its not fully released yet, but compared to many AAA titles coming out these days, the game was in better shape in its alpha stage than many of them at their full release, so you can see that the dev team really does care), furthermore the devs kept(and still are) rolling out new updates and polishing the game.(so you can rest assured that people are actively trying to get the game where it should be.) The game itself came out with basically all the features of the previous titles either straight out imported or advanced to a new level and imported, there were also many new mechanics(even at that early stage so it definitely did not feel like a remaster of the previous title but more like a familiar yet somehow completely new game, you could feel that you were playing mount and blade, but it had sort of a strange new feeling to it, with the improved graphics and features) and after few months there were even many mods that you could download(which I was a huge fan of in warband and basically only played modded overhauls), however as there were almost constant updates on a weekly basis, modders couldnt keep up with the updates so I was sometimes stuck on the same version for months, just because of the fact that I didnt want to lose mods that worked so well for me and couldnt keep up with the updates, and this became a huge problem for me later, after playing for some 120 hours I realized that the native experience simply doesnt do it for me anymore(and there werent any overhauls yet), it got really stale and boring and I arrived at that stage where I wanted to play overhauls, however at this point I found out that even after a year after release there simply werent any full overhauls of the game(it should be obvious as the devs of those mod who do them in their free time cant manage to put them), and this situation persists even today the day of writing this review(not all of the mods are being frequently updated and are not keeping up with the game updates), so there is a huge question to ask yourself(if you have played previous titles), did u spend countless hours playing and enjoying the native game? If your answer is yes you should definitely buy Bannerlord as it is right now, if not you could wait before purchasing but what I recommend is still purchasing the game enjoying the native for as long as you can and then simply wait until a mod overhaul that you are interested gets released, and if you are completely new to the game, you should certainly try out if you are in that sort of game genre as this game series is one the best at what it does.

Dota 2 is very much like later stages of inoperable pancreatic cancer, its basically impossible to get rid of it after an extensive period of time, and even if you find yourself to be under the false pretense that you did, there is the almost inevitable eventuality of it making a way back into your life one way or the other, ultimately there is not much you can realistically do about it, there is no escape it slowly and painfully kills you both mentally and physically, it eats you away like a festering wound and leaves you a bitter, depressed and hollow shell of your former self wishing for the ability to travel back in time to stop your past self from making this faithfull mistake of selling your soul to this godforsaken game 10/10 would definitely recommend.